House of Paine

corporate electronic anklets

can we high tech 
a good boy harness 
for big capital?


One does not have to look far in Washington these days
to find evidence that government policy is being
crafted with America's biggest corporations in mind.

For example, the Bush administration's 2006 budget cuts
the enforcement budgets of almost all the major
regulatory agencies. If the gutting of the ergonomics
rule, power plant emissions standards and drug safety
programs was not already enough evidence that OSHA, EPA
and FDA are deeply compromised, the slashing of their
enforcement budgets presents the possibility--indeed,
probability--that these public agencies will become
captives of the private corporations they are supposed
to regulate.

This should come as no surprise to anybody familiar
with the streams of corporate money that flowed into
Bush campaign coffers (as well as the Kerry campaign
and all races for the House and Senate) in the 2004
election. The old "follow the money" adage leads us to
a democracy in thrall to giant corporations--a democracy
that is a far cry from the government "of the people,
by the people, and for the people" that Lincoln hailed
at Gettysburg.

At a time when our democracy appears to be so
thoroughly under the sway of large corporations, it is
tempting to give up on politics. We must resist this
temptation. Democracy offers the best solution to
challenging corporate power. We must engage as
citizens, not just as consumers or investors angling
for a share of President Bush's "ownership society."
The problem of corporate power

Unfortunately, the destructive power of large
corporations today is not limited to the political
sphere. The increasing domination of corporations over
virtually every dimension of our lives--economic,
political, cultural, even spiritual--poses a fundamental
threat to the well-being of our society.

Corporations have fostered a polarization of wealth
that has undermined our faith in a shared sense of
prosperity. A corporate-driven consumer culture has led
millions of Americans into personal debt, and alienated
millions more by convincing them that the only path to
happiness is through the purchase and consumption of
ever-increasing quantities of material goods. The
damage to the earth's life-supporting systems caused by
the accelerating extraction of natural resources and
the continued production, use, and disposal of
life-threatening chemicals and greenhouse gases is huge
and, in some respects, irreversible.

Today's giant corporations spend billions of dollars a
year to project a positive, friendly and caring image,
promoting themselves as "responsible citizens" and
"good neighbors." They have large marketing budgets and
public relations experts skilled at neutralizing their
critics and diverting attention from any controversy.
By 2004, corporate advertising expenditures were
expected to top $250 billion, enough to bring the
average American more than 2,000 commercial messages a
day.

The problem of the corporation is at root one of
design. Corporations are not structured to be
benevolent institutions; they are structured to make
money. In the pursuit of this one goal, they will
freely cast aside concerns about the societies and
ecological systems in which they operate.

When corporations reach the size that they have reached
today, they begin to overwhelm the political
institutions that can keep them in check, eroding key
limitations on their destructive capacities.
Internationally, of the 100 largest economies in the
world, 51 are corporations and 49 are nations. How Big
Business got to be so big

Corporations in the United States began as
quasi-government institutions, business organizations
created by deliberate acts of state governments for
distinct public purposes such as building canals or
turnpikes. These corporations were limited in size and
had only those rights and privileges directly written
into their charters. As corporations grew bigger and
more independent, their legal status changed them from
creatures of the state to independent entities, from
mere business organizations to "persons" with
constitutional rights.

The last three decades have represented the most
sustained pro-business period in U.S. history.

The corporate sector's game plan for fortifying its
power in America was outlined in a memo written in
August 1971 by soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis
F. Powell Jr. at the behest of the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce. The "Powell Memorandum," drafted in response
to rising popular skepticism about the role of big
business and the unprecedented growth of consumer and
environmental protection laws, was intended as a
catalytic plan to spur big business into action. Powell
argued that corporate leaders should single out the
campuses, the courts and the media as key
battlegrounds.

One of the most significant developments that followed
Powell's memo was the formation of the Business
Roundtable in 1972 by Frederick Borch of General
Electric and John Harper of Alcoa. As author Ted Nace
has explained, "The Business Roundtable ... functioned as
a sort of senate for the corporate elite, allowing big
business as a whole to set priorities and deploy its
resources in a more effective way than ever before. ...
The '70s saw the creation of institutions to support
the corporate agenda, including foundations, think
tanks, litigation centers, publications, and
increasingly sophisticated public relations and
lobbying agencies."

For example, beer magnate Joseph Coors, moved by
Powell's memo, donated a quarter of a million dollars
to the Analysis and Research Association, the
forerunner of the massive font of pro-business and
conservative propaganda known today as the Heritage
Foundation. Meanwhile, existing but tiny conservative
think tanks, like the Hoover Institute and the American
Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, grew
dramatically in the '70s. Today, they are key players
in the pro-business policy apparatus that dominates
state and federal policymaking.

According to a 2004 study by the National Committee for
Responsive Philanthropy, between 1999 and 2001, 79
conservative foundations made more than $252 million in
grants to 350 "archconservative policy nonprofit
organizations." By contrast, the few timid foundations
that have funded liberal causes often seem to act as a
"drag anchor" on the progressive movement, moving from
issue to issue like trust fund children with a serious
case of attention-deficit disorder. From analysis to
action

The vast majority of people, when asked, believe that
corporations have too much power and are too focused on
making a profit. "Business has gained too much power
over too many aspects of American life," agreed 82
percent of respondents in a June 2000 Business Week
poll, a year and a half before Enron's collapse. A 2004
Harris poll found that three-quarters of respondents
said that the image of large corporations was either
"not good" or "terrible."

Corporations have achieved their dominant role in
society through a complex power grab that spans the
economic, political, legal and cultural spheres. Any
attempt to challenge their power must take all these
areas into account.

There is a great need to develop a domestic strategy
for challenging corporate power in the United States,
where 185 of the world's 500 largest corporations are
headquartered. Although any efforts to challenge
corporations are inevitably bound up in the global
justice movement, there is much to do here in the
United States that can have a profoundly important
effect on the global situation.

By understanding the origin of the corporation as a
creature of the state, we can better understand how we,
as citizens with sovereignty over our government,
ultimately can and must assert our right to hold
corporations accountable. The task is to understand how
we can begin to reestablish true citizen sovereignty in
a country where corporations currently have almost all
the power. Developing the movement

To free our economy, culture and politics from the grip
of giant corporations, we will have to develop a large,
diverse and well-organized movement. But at what level
should we focus our efforts: local, state, national or
global? The answer, we believe, is a balance of all
four.

Across the country, many local communities continue to
organize in resistance to giant chain stores like
Wal-Mart, predatory lenders, factory farms, private
prisons, incinerators and landfills, the planting of
genetically modified organisms, and nuclear power
plants. Local communities are continuously organizing
to strengthen local businesses, raise the living wage,
resist predatory marketing in schools, cut off
corporate welfare and protect essential services such
as water from privatization. Local struggles are
crucial for recruiting citizens to the broader struggle
against corporate rule.

Unfortunately, examples of grassroots movements that
have succeeded in placing structural restraints on
corporations are not as common as they should be. One
of the ways we can accelerate the process is by
organizing a large-scale national network of state and
local lawmakers who are interested in enacting policies
that address specific issues or place broader
restraints on corporate power.

Just as the corporations have the powerful American
Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to distribute and
support model legislation in the states, so we need our
own networks to experiment with and advance different
policies that can curb and limit corporate power. The
National Caucus of Environmental Legislators--a
low-budget coalition of state lawmakers established in
1996 in response to the Republican takeover of Congress
and several state legislatures--is a model that could be
used to introduce and advance innovative legislative
ideas at the state level. The New Rules Project has
also begun to analyze and compile information on these
kinds of laws. Additionally, the U.S. PIRG network of
state public interest research groups and the Center
for Policy Alternatives have worked to promote model
progressive legislation, as has the newly founded
American Legislative Issue Campaign Exchange (ALICE).
Moving the movement

Despite their many strengths, many major movements of
the past few decades (labor, environmental, consumer)
have all suffered from internal fractures and a lack of
connection to the broader society. The result is that
they have been increasingly boxed into "special
interest" roles, despite the fact that the policies
they advocate generally benefit the vast majority of
people.

Cognitive linguist George Lakoff puts it this way:
"Coalitions with different interest-based messages for
different voting blocks [are] without a general moral
vision. Movements, on the other hand, are based on
shared values, values that define who we are. They have
a better chance of being broad-based and lasting. In
short, progressives need to be thinking in terms of a
broad-based progressive-values movement, not in terms
of issue coalitions."

If there is one group at the center of the struggle to
challenge corporate power, it is organized labor. As a
Century Foundation Task Force Report on the Future of
Unions concluded, "Labor unions have been the single
most important agent for social justice in the United
States."

Labor is at the forefront of efforts to challenge
excessive CEO pay, corporate attempts to move their
headquarters offshore to avoid paying their fair share
of taxes, and the outsourcing of jobs. Labor also has
played a leading role in opposing the war in Iraq and
exposing war profiteers benefiting from Iraq
reconstruction contracts.

As AFL-CIO President John Sweeney has written, unions
need to start "building social movements that reach
beyond the workplace into the entire community and
offer working people beyond our ranks the opportunity
to improve their lives and livelihood." This is
beginning to occur more frequently. Union locals and
national labor support groups like Jobs With Justice
have been a key force in building cross-town alliances
around economic justice battles such as living wage
campaigns and the new Fair Taxes for All campaign.

These union-led, cross-community alliances have in turn
supported some of the strongest union organizing
campaigns, including the nearly two-decades-old Justice
for Janitors campaign that the Service Employees
International Union (SEIU) and its allies successfully
organized in Los Angeles and other cities across the
country.

Clearly, labor unions, along with community-based
organizations and churches, will be central to the
construction of lasting local coalitions that can serve
as organizing clearinghouses to challenge corporate
rule. Constructing a new politics

To challenge corporate power we must also value and
rebuild the public sphere, and draw clear lines of
resistance against the expansion of corporate power,
such as the current push by Bush to convert Social
Security into individual investment accounts that will
allow Wall Street to rake off billions of dollars in
annual brokerage fees. Most importantly, we must work
to change the rules instead of agreeing to play with a
stacked deck.

In our hyper-commercialized culture, we spend far more
time and energy thinking about what products we want to
buy next instead of thinking about how we can change
our local communities for the better, or affect the
latest debates in Washington, D.C. or the state
capitol. And when so much energy is spent on commercial
and material pursuits instead of on collective and
political pursuits, we begin to think of ourselves as
consumers, not citizens, with little understanding of
how or why we are so disempowered.

The restoration of democracy requires us to address the
backstory behind this process of psychological
colonization. It requires us to address the public
policies and judicial doctrines that treat advertising
as a public good--a tax-deductible business expense and
a form of speech protected by the First Amendment. It's
been so long since we have seriously addressed such
fundamental questions that, as a result, the average
American is now exposed to more than 100 commercial
messages per waking hour. As of October 2003, there
were 46,438 shopping malls in the United States,
covering 5.8 billion square feet of space, or about
20.2 square feet for every man, woman and child in the
United States. As economist Juliet Schor reports,
"Americans spend three to four times as many hours a
year shopping as their counterparts in Western European
countries. Once a purely utilitarian chore, shopping
has been elevated to the status of a national passion."

A consequence of the hyper-commercialization of our
culture is that instead of organizing collectively, we
often buy into the market-based ideology of individual
choice and responsibility and assume that we can change
the world by changing our personal habits of
consumption. The politics of recycling offers a minor
but telling example of how corporations manage to
escape blame by utilizing the politics of personal
responsibility. Although recycling is a decent habit,
the message conveyed is that the onus for environmental
sustainability largely rests upon the individual, and
that the solutions to pollution are not to be found
further upstream in the industrial system.

The personal choices we make are important. But we
shouldn't assume that's the best we can do. We need to
understand that it can't truly be a matter of choice
until we get some more say in what our choices are.
True power still resides in the ability to write,
enforce and judge the laws of the land, no matter what
the corporations and their personal-choice,
market-centered view of the world instruct us to
believe. Rebuilding the public sphere

With increased corporate encroachment upon our schools
and universities, our arts institutions, our houses of
worship and even our elections, we are losing the
independent institutions that once nurtured and
developed the values and beliefs necessary to challenge
the corporate worldview. These and other institutions
and public assets should be considered valuable parts
of a public "commons" of our collective heritage and
therefore off limits to for-profit corporations.

"The idea of the commons helps us identify and describe
the common values that lie beyond the marketplace,"
writes author David Bollier. "We can begin to develop a
more textured appreciation for the importance of civic
commitment, democratic norms, social equity, cultural
and aesthetic concerns, and ecological needs. . . . A
language of the commons also serves to restore
humanistic, democratic concerns to their proper place
in public policy-making. It insists that citizenship
trumps ownership, that the democratic tradition be
given an equal or superior footing vis-a-vis the
economic categories of the market." Changing the rules

Much citizen organizing today focuses on influencing
administrative, legislative and judicial processes that
are set up to favor large corporations from the very
start. Put simply, many of the rules are not fair, and
until we can begin to collectively challenge this
fundamental unfairness, we will continue to fight with
one hand tied behind our backs. Instead of providing
opportunities for people to organize collectively to
demand real political solutions and start asking tough
questions about how harmful policies become law in the
first place, many community-based organizations seem
content to merely clean up the mess left behind by
failed economic policies and declining social services.

The most successful organizing happens when it is
focused on specific demands. Two crucial reforms have
great potential to aid the movement's ability to grow:
fundamental campaign finance reform and media reform.
Together, these could serve as a compelling foundation
for a mass movement that challenges corporate power
more broadly.

The movement for citizen-controlled elections,
organized at the local level with support from national
groups such as the Center for Voting and Democracy and
Public Campaign, provides a useful framework for action
for the broad spectrum of people who currently feel
shut out of politics.

Media reform is also essential. With growing government
secrecy and a corporate-dominated two-party political
system, the role of independent media is more critical
than ever. As Bill Moyers suggested in his keynote
address at the National Conference on Media Reform in
2003, "If free and independent journalism committed to
telling the truth without fear or favor is suffocated,
the oxygen goes out of democracy."

The media have always been and will continue to be the
most important tool for communicating ideas and
educating the public about ongoing problems. Thomas
Paine wrote more than 200 years ago:

There is nothing that obtains so general an influence
over the manners and morals of a people as the press;
from that as from a fountain the streams of vice or
virtue are poured forth over a nation."

History is replete with examples that show how critical
the media's role has been in addressing the injustices
of our society. For instance, many Progressive Era
reforms came only in response to the investigative
exposes of corporate abuses by muckraking journalists
like Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell. Writing in popular
magazines like Collier's and McClure's, these writers
provided a powerful public challenge to the corruption
of the Gilded Age.

Because of increased corporate consolidation of the
media, coverage of all levels of government has been
greatly reduced. When people are kept ignorant of what
is happening in their communities, in their states, in
Washington, D.C. and in the world, it becomes much
easier for large corporations to overwhelm the
political process and control the economy without
citizens understanding what is happening. Though media
reform is a complex subject, one approach bears
mentioning--establishing and strengthening nonprofit
media outlets. The long-term vision

Though campaign finance reform and media reform offer
useful starting points, ultimately, there is much more
to be done. We need to get tough on corporate crime. We
need to make sure markets are properly competitive by
breaking up the giant corporate monopolies and
oligarchies. We need to make corporations more
accountable to all stakeholders and less focused on
maximizing shareholder profit above all. We need to
stop allowing corporations to claim Bill of Rights
protections to undermine citizen-enacted laws.

Ultimately, we need to restore the understanding that
in a democracy the rights of citizens to govern
themselves are more important than the rights of
corporations to make money. Since their charters and
licenses are granted by citizen governments, it should
be up to the people to decide how corporations can
serve the public good and what should be done when they
don't. As Justices Byron White, William Brennan and
Thurgood Marshall noted in 1978: "Corporations are
artificial entities created by law for the purpose of
furthering certain economic goals. . . . The State need
not permit its own creation to consume it." The
people's business

The many constituencies concerned with the consequences
of corporate power are indeed a diverse group, and
although this diversity can be a source of strength, it
also makes it difficult to clearly articulate a vision
for the struggle. What principles, then, can unite us?

One abiding faith that almost all of us share is that
of citizen democracy: that citizens should be able to
decide how they wish to live through democratic
processes and that big corporations should not be able
to tell citizens how to live their lives and run their
communities. The most effective way to control
corporations will be to restore citizen democracy and
to reclaim the once widely accepted principle that
corporations are but creatures of the state, chartered
under the premise that they will serve the public good,
and entitled to only those rights and privileges
granted by citizen-controlled governments. Only by
doing so will we be able to create the just and
sustainable economy that we seek, an economy driven by
the values of human life and community and democracy
instead of the current suicide economy driven only by
the relentless pursuit of financial profit at any cost.

Therefore, we must work assiduously to challenge the
dominant role of the corporation in our lives and in
our politics. We must reestablish citizen sovereignty,
and we must restore the corporations to their proper
role as the servants of the people, not our masters.
This is the people's business.

Lee Drutman is the communications director of Citizen
Works; and Charlie Cray is the director of the Center
for Corporate Policy. They are co-authors of The
People's Business: Controlling Corporations and